NJGPA Practice Test 10

Second Chair — by Adaeze Kimura

¹The seating list for the Lakeshore Youth Symphony would be posted at four o'clock, and at 3:52 Beatriz was sitting on the hallway floor outside the rehearsal hall, her back against the cinder-block wall, trying to look like a person who was reading. The book had been open to the same page since 3:30. Down the hall, a cluster of cellists laughed too loudly at something that was not funny. Nobody was looking at the corkboard on the door, and everybody was looking at it.

²Corinne sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched. She was humming under her breath—the audition excerpt, of course, the eight measures from the second movement that every violinist had been assigned. She hummed it perfectly now. Beatriz knew, because Beatriz was the reason.

³Yesterday afternoon the practice rooms had been full, and the walls in that building were thin enough to pass notes through. Beatriz had stopped to rosin her bow when she heard it coming through the wall from the next room: the same eight measures, played beautifully, with one problem. Where the score had a dotted rhythm—long, short, long, short, a limp that gave the passage its swing—Corinne was playing the notes evenly, smooth as a row of beads.

⁴Beatriz knew that sound. Two years earlier she had made the same mistake in her own audition, had watched the judge's pencil move across his clipboard, and had placed ninth. Mr. Davenport, who coached them both, liked to say that judges forgave a wrong note sooner than a wrong idea. Corinne had the wrong idea, and she had been playing it for so long that it had begun to sound right to her.

⁵For a full minute Beatriz did not move. It would be easy to say nothing. It would not even be a lie; Corinne had the same score she did. And there was only one first chair, and Beatriz had wanted it since she was eleven years old and had sat in the back of this same hall watching a girl with a long braid lead the orchestra through a piece so fast that the bows looked like weather.

⁶She thought about that girl. Then she thought about the afternoon in seventh grade when Corinne had walked a mile in the rain to bring Beatriz the music she had left on the bus, and had shrugged off her thanks as if it were nothing, as if anyone would have done it.

⁷Beatriz set down her rosin, knocked twice on the wall, and went next door.

⁸"Measure five," she said when Corinne opened the door. "It's dotted. You're playing it straight."

⁹Corinne looked at the score for a long moment. Then she played it the right way, and the passage stood up on its legs and walked. She lowered her violin and looked at Beatriz with an expression Beatriz could not read. "You didn't have to tell me that," she said.

¹⁰"I know," said Beatriz, and went back to her own room before either of them could say anything else.

¹¹Now, at 4:01, Ms. Halloran came down the hallway with a sheet of paper and a box of pushpins, and the hallway went silent the way a forest goes silent before rain. She pinned the list to the board without looking at anyone. The crowd closed over the door like water.

¹²Beatriz did not have to push forward. She could see the top of the list over a cellist's shoulder. Concertmaster: Corinne Aldana. Principal Second Violin: Beatriz Ibarra.

¹³She had expected to feel it in her stomach, and she did, a hard drop like missing a stair in the dark. But underneath the drop was something she had not expected, something that felt oddly like standing up straight.

¹⁴Corinne had turned to her, and her face was doing the thing it had done in the practice room. "Bea," she said. "If you hadn't—"

¹⁵"You'd still have played the rest of it better than me," Beatriz said, and was surprised to find that she meant it, mostly. "Your shifts are cleaner. You know they are."

¹⁶Corinne opened her mouth, closed it, and then did something she had not done since they were twelve: she hooked her little finger around Beatriz's and held on. They stood that way while the hallway emptied around them, the second chair and the first, and Beatriz thought that someday she would want the first chair again, and that she would try for it, and that it would be all right either way.